their flight. They can't change the direction in which they are going until they touch water again. That's how the tuna catches them, it swims under in a straight line and grabs the fish as it comes down to get impetus for another flight."
"But I thought flying-fish went ever so much higher than that!" said the boy. "I'm sure I've read of their landing on the decks of vessels!"
"They do," was the answer; "they are attracted by the glare of the lights and fall on board. But that is generally on sailing vessels with a low freeboard. You don't often hear of flying-fish falling on the deck of a modern liner, and in the few cases in which they have, it has been because they happened to come out of the water with a rush against a slant of wind which carried them up twenty or thirty feet. They go with an awful force, and I knew an angler once who was pitched head first overboard by a flying-fish, and was nearly drowned before his boatman could get him aboard. He had been struck square between the shoulders and the blow had stunned him for the moment."
"Suppose a chap got hit by a tuna?" queried the boy.
"That's less likely," the father answered, "be
cause, you see, the tuna comes nearly straight up and down; he leaps, he doesn't skim."
"Zere was one went t'rough a boat last season, Major Dare," the boatman interjected. "It was late in ze year, after you had gone, I t'ink, sair."
"Had it been hooked?" asked Colin.
"No, sair," the boatman answered; "tuna don't leap after zey are hooked. It was when zey were chasing a school, just like this."
"You're thinking of the tarpon, Colin," his father said; "it leaps wildly after it has been hooked. The tuna, although a wonderful leaper, hardly ever rises from the water after it is fast to the line. But the tarpon is a vicious fighter. A couple of years ago a boat was found drifting in the Galveston fishing-ground off Texas, with a dead angler and a dead tarpon. The fish had been hooked and had tried to leap over the boat, striking the angler and breaking his neck, then had fallen into the boat itself and had not been able to get out."